'War Z' Producer Sergey Titov On Losing Steam, 'Day Z' Comparisons

The War Z has been a controversial zombie game since its inception. The game's producer talks about the latest controversy and comparisons to the popular Day Z mod.

The War Z has been a very controversial game, even before its disastrous launch on Steam earlier this year.

The controversy started when the game was first announced, and people began murmuring about its apparent similarities to Day Z, a popular zombie mod of the war game ARMA II.

When The War Z launched on Steam, many of its advertised features were missing. Valve, the game developer and publisher that runs Steam, ended up pulling the game from its digital store front, though it still has a page there where you can see its dismal 23/100 Metacritic score.

But after numerous interviews and the game getting yanked from Steam, Titov began to change his tune, issuing an open letter to fans and an apology for the game's half-baked release---though one could, if one were so inclined, question the sincerity of that apology. Still, I think Titov and his team do genuinely want to rebuild their and the game's reputation, however steep a hill that may be to climb.

Titov, formerly of League of Legends creator Riot Games, is part of Arktos Entertainment Group. The firm is a "privately held holding company, providing investment as well as creative and production management support for companies in the interactive and online entertainment industries," according to its web page, where it lists the developer Online Warmongers and their title The War Inc. but not The War Z or Hammerpoint.

The Los Angeles based holding company invests in developers of online games, though it appears that licensing out their low-cost game engine is a big part of the company's plans.

I spoke with Mr. Titov about the game, its similarity to Day Z and what he and Hammerpoint Interactive are doing to fix the problems and get the title back on Steam.

The unfiltered Q&A after the leap.

A screenshot from zombie MMO 'The War Z.'

Forbes: Your initial responses in interviews following The War Z's release on Steam largely seemed to blame gamers for misreading the game description. Why issue an apology now?

Sergey Titov: Well, to begin with, it really was not the intent to blame players, but more to convey that I thought it was more of a misunderstanding versus a deliberate attempt to mislead anyone. I think the problem was in how my answers came across in the Gamespy interview. It wasn’t really a formal interview – it was more like an end-of-day skype chat conversation, that was edited to look like an interview. Some of the points were omitted, and it wasn’t clearly presented. It was presented to us as a quick chat to get my comments regarding a story that was about to post on their site and we were never told that it was going to be edited, cut and pasted into an interview. YET – we completely acknowledged that yes there were couple of factual mistakes on the sale page that we corrected within the first day of sales. One of the big ones that Gamespy questioned was the statement of “up to 100 player servers.” The interesting fact is that during this “interview” I asked Dan if when he reads "up to 100 players" does he expect that there will be a 100 slot server. When he answered yes we turned on some 100 slot servers right on the spot. It was definitely a misunderstanding on our end and one that we remedied immediately. We had recently completed a survey of the community asking what size to limit the servers to and the overwhelming response was to limit to 50 slots.

As for the apology – this was a much bigger thing than just the Steam page. I’ve evaluated our communication in general and realized that we had made some errors. That if we’d did them differently in the first place we would have avoided a lot of the criticism we've been dealing with recently – both the legitimate and exaggerated. So it was my sincere attempt to explain to our community what happened, and what I personally think about it.

How did you become involved in this project to begin with?

When I left Riot Games back in 2008 I formed a company called Arktos Entertainment Group. Arktos has 2 directives; to find and invest in talented development teams and individuals in order to develop cool online games and, second, to develop technology and IP for a world class online gaming platform. One of the first teams we financed was Online Warmongers; the developer and publisher of a pretty cool f2p shooter game War Inc Battlezone. Internally as part of our Online Gaming Platform we developed a Prototype for a zombie action game primarily for the PS3 as the lead platform but with PC and XBOX support. We thought about transitioning development to the Online Warmongers team but they were too busy with War Inc to get involved at that time, so Arktos turned to Hammerpoint Interactive.

For me personally I like to work with talented people and keep core development groups focused. This can sometimes lead to many of us wearing several hats, and I effectively ended up the public face of The War Z.

Why did you decide to release the game when you did? Typically games aren't released so soon after their alpha phase.

I think it’s not an uncommon practice for online games and, technically, we’ve been “out” for more than two months. Since October 31st, when we opened up our Alpha without any restrictions – anybody could purchase access to the game and was able to play. Our ratio of daily players to monthly players and number of concurrent users to number of daily users were really strong, so we felt it was important for us to “draw a line” and confirm to our players that we were transitioning to the Foundation Release. We wanted our current community to feel comfortable, yet, once again, we probably delivered this message to the core audience, but failed to make this point really clear for the rest of the players and more importantly to new players.

A screenshot from the popular 'Day Z' mod.

You've said that an online game is never really "finished." If that's the case, how do you gauge when something is ready for launch?

All online games, including The War Z, go through a series of stages in the development process in which players (other than the dev team) are participating in the game. The most significant stage is "open beta," when the game is pretty much able to be accessed by the gaming community at large. Some online games remain in this "open beta" stage for quite an extended period while making, in some cases, millions of dollars, while the game is technically still in "open beta" (just one example of this is Farmville that stayed in open beta for about two years). This differs drastically from the retail "boxed product" model (think Call of Duty or other similar titles) where consumers purchase a "final" version that is designed to provide X number of hours of single-player gameplay and may or may not have a multiplayer component as well.

What we at Hammerpoint were striving for was to deliver a live and playable product with the core features intact. Did this mean that development was complete? Absolutely not and we never intended for it to be perceived as a finished game. We did not want to use the term "beta" so we instead called it the "Foundation Release." The one thing we did not anticipate (and some members of the press called attention to this) was that the term "Foundation Release" was not familiar enough amongst players and we neglected to communicate effectively what was included and what was still in development. At the end of the day it did create some controversy, but fortunately the game is still doing very well and our community continues to grow. We are still developing and releasing new updates with features, content, fixes, etc. and we will continue on that path of development.

Why do you think there has been so much controversy surrounding this game?

I think that's pretty clear :) – one big reason is because of the obvious similarities with Day Z - both theme wise and more importantly – time wise. But to be honest – Day Z mod is a love/hate type of thing for gamers. There’re people who fanatically love it, so when we announced The War Z and described what the game is about, what our timeline for launch was, etc – it instantly became a love/hate thing too. For a long time I thought “okay, this is fine, we don’t care about those guys anyway” – but ultimately I was wrong – we should have put much more effort into explaining the differences between the two products.

When people started to play The War Z, they realized that it’s pretty different from Day Z in many ways, but it's still generating the same love/hate thing – they either really like The War Z – and they like the choices we’ve made or they're saying “okay this is nothing like Day Z, so I hate it”. We have a very solid community right now and the game itself is doing GREAT. We’re getting thousands of new players every day, and the majority of them are coming to the game by word of mouth from existing players. Though, according to some press, we’re pretty much dead and will never recover, but for us it’s like “huh?” It’s very weird to see those two different worlds coexist together. At the same time it’s a very good lesson for us, and ultimately it’s a price we’ve paid for pushing forward all guns blazing instead of choosing a more cautious approach. We really wanted to get to market first and in the process we didn't pay as close attention to detail as we should have and we also neglected to communicate as we should have.

The War Z

How did the name "The War Z" come up? Were you worried that it would be compared to Day Z or the book and upcoming film World War Z?

Myself and a couple of other guys who financed The War Z were also investors in “The War Inc,” a free-to-play shooter. Sooo…. We had a plan of continuing with "The War …" theme so natuarally “The War” + Z – made perfect sense for us. And yes we had an idea that some people that didn't know this backstory would jump straight into conclusions that the title is mimicking either Day Z or WWZ – but we really loved this title. We registered the domain in May 2012 I think, until that the project was only known as “zombie game 1.”

When we started development we wanted to reach two groups of players – general fans of zombie games and also fans of more persistent, survival/"rebuild society" type of games. DayZ fans seem to fall into both groups so we knew right away that there would be comparisons between the two games. When we first announced, DayZ still existed only as a super popular MOD for ARMA2, but when we heard they were doing a standalone version we figured that two games within the genre would just provide more for the audience. I do believe that there are some significant differences between the two games. First and foremost, we tried to create more of an MMO experience with multiple characters, advanced inventory management, moving items between characters, offering a variety of tools to use for cooperation or competing against other survivors. A large part of what we feel gameplay will evolve into is players forming communities and clans within the game and then creating their own instances on smaller maps – we call them "Strongholds." Our focus is less on providing an ultra realistic, hardcore simulation and more on a sandbox environment that can be enjoyed by a wide variety of players. I think that as we release more content and more features in the coming weeks that the gap between the two games will widen and become much more visible.

In any case, we've always felt that there is room for both games and there will be certain players that play one or the other – and some players that enjoy both!

What led to the game being pulled from Steam? What steps do you plan on taking to get it reinstated? Are you working with Valve on this?

When we launched the game on Steam, we got some feedback that people were not okay with the game description and that it was creating confusion as to what people were purchasing. We changed it within the first 16 hours after launch. It had already been picked up by several media sources, some which were just reporting news and some that seemed to have a bit of a biased slant. As result – Steam received an larger than ordinary number of support requests tickets, and this led to a temporary removal from the store until all those support issues will are resolved. We recognize that Steam has a responsibility to it’s customers first and making sure that customers get exactly what is described. We’re working with Steam on both of these issues. We expect to have everything sorted out very soon.

Day Z

Tell me about some of the changes going on inside the company and the efforts underway to get the game back on Steam.

Right now Hammerpoint Interactive (developer of the game) is adding new talent to the team, adding more resources to the development of the game, and focusing on completing the features that are most in demand by the players. At the same time, OP Productions (publisher for The War Z) is completely revising its process when it comes to communication and more importantly community management and customer support. We are also aggressively taking measures to ensure the best possible game experience for our customers and OP Productions is currently implementing a very robust, enterprise-class solutions procedure to ensure that we can handle any possible issues in a speedy fashion.

As for Steam, the game is continuing to grow on a daily basis – we’re adding thousands of new players every day. Right now we want to ensure that we are meeting the expectations of the players who buy the game from our own website and also meet the expectations of the Steam community.

So what about concrete steps?

First of all we’ve made sure that description of the game in Steam store is in line with game features that are already available in a game build, and exclude features that are coming soon or being tested right now. We’ve spent last month making sure that game will meet and hopefully exceed Steam community expectations, to make sure that it will include features that our community asked for. We’re preparing large patch for a game right now, and once it’s released, we’ll evaluate if it’s meets Steam community expectations.

At same time we’ve added feature for a players who already bought game on our website and want to access War Z from within Steam. For all players we allow them to get Steam activation key to download game from Steam and use Steam Wallet for in game purchases.

How will you ensure the micro-transactions in War Z don't result in pay-to-win? Why include micro-transactions in a game you have to purchase in the first place?

So from our perspective, Pay-to-Win is offering (for real world currency) in-game items or abilities that will give a player a significant advantage in the game that other players will not have if they don't purchase. In other words, selling something that can't be acquired by investing time or "grinding" in the game. Also, the acceptance of a "pay-to-win" model is very different in different cultures. With The War Z we wanted players to be able to acquire the same or similar items as could be purchased, by simply investing time into the game. Most of the items for sale in the game store are can also be found in the game world. Some are definitely more rare and will require a significant investment of time. For the items that are unique to the store, it is primarily cosmetic and there is always an in-game alternative that will provide the same gameplay effect without spending anything. The idea of the store in The War Z was more of a "pay-for-convenience" in order to save time.

As for the business model, we looked at all of the different models used for supporting an online game, including selling for a higher "retail" price and then charging a subscription, to an initial purchase and then selling "DLC" or "Expansions," to going free-to-play with a robust in-game economy that would require players to spend money in order to continue playing. We opted for a meld (as some other large titles have done) by setting a reasonable purchase price and providing all content updates for free. The in-game transactions are there to continue to provide revenue to support development as long as there is a community playing the game. Ultimately, the in-game transactions are just an option for the player and only a small percentage of our players are spending on microtransactions. They also speak with their wallets and let us know what is working and what is not. If they are happy we see microtransaction revenues increase, if they are not we see the opposite.

Are you working on any other projects currently?

We currently have two more titles being developed by Hammerpoint Interactive – they are in various stages of preproduction. Hammerpoint is taking a much more careful approach with those titles, so I can’t speak about details right now. It is also unclear if Hammerpoint is going to operate those titles by themselves, or rely on a third party publisher/operator as was the case with The War Z ( published worldwide by OP Productions LLC ). We’re going to announce those titles later this year. All I can say right now is that both titles will be Free to Play games.